Tension is to be loved

not a review, perhaps something substantial...

"But tension is to be loved when it is like a passing note to a beautiful, beautiful chord..."

Such are the words of Sixpence None the Richer (a highly under-rated band) in their song Tension is a Passing Note from their tremendous album "Divine Discontent." The song itself is about being in a long-distance relationship, but it touches on the fundamental truth about the structure of music* itself.

You've heard the Rufus Wainwright song (covering the substantially better Jeff Buckley version, which itself was covering the classic Leonard Cohen song) Hallelujah, most popular from the Shrek movie. They talk about it, too, "...it goes like this, the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall and the major lift."

For those of you who don't speak music, the fourth and fifth refer to the fourth and fifth notes (or chords) in a scale, and the minor and major are different chord voicings. Basic scales contain seven unique chords at their foundation, including three major, three minor, and one diminished chord. Most simplistically put, major chords sound more bright and cheerful, and minor chords sound more dark and somber. Diminished chords are the redheaded stepchildren and appear very rarely in popular song & verse.

The elements that make up a melody are--at their root, in their essence--a combination of three different dichotic relationships, on & off, loud & quiet, and consonance & dissonance.

As a musician, one of my core tenants is the idea that the notes that you do not play are just as important as the notes that you do play. This is the relationship between on & off, when you play a note and when you do not. From this relationship, we derive rhythm. It is my opinion that this is often abused in modern music, especially by lead guitarists and keyboard players who learned solo piano before joining groups and bands.

S p a c e   i s   i m p o r t a n t   i n   s e t t i n g   a n          a  t  m  o  s  p  h  e  r  e             a n d   impact

The difference between loud & quiet (known as dynamics, in music speak) is the most overtly obvious relationship, and also one of the hardest for amateur musicians to control. It's so easy to play everything loud and full. Combined with a disrespect for space in music, we (musicians) churn out cacophonic, lumbering jet engines of songs. It's a lot about ego, no-one wants to be left out or trust the other musicians to carry the moment. Nobody said musicians were overly concerned with the well-being of the whole.

The least obvious, and perhaps most important from a melodic standpoint, is dissonance. As I already mentioned, there are seven core notes in any scale, beginning with the root (first) note. This is the foundation, the basis for all comparisons in the melody. The remaining seven notes have varying degrees of conflict or harmony with the root note. The third and fifth notes are the most harmonious, and the seventh is the most conflicting (or dissonant). (In reality, there are eleven potential instead of seven, but the other four are too dissonant, and appear infrequently. We're speaking in very broad terms here, you must understand, there is a great deal of nuance and a whole lot more to it when you start digging deep) It is the relationships between these notes (or their respective chords) and the root note that drive everything we know as harmony and melody. The further you travel from the root note, in terms of dissonant notes, the greater the tension and need for a resolve (a return to the root note).

Legend has it, probably an urban legend but a good example, that Beethoven's housekeeper had trouble getting his attention when he was engrossed in his work. To draw his attention, she would play a chord progression on the piano, and end it without resolving back to the root chord. Beethoven would be so unsettled by the lack of resolve that he would come down and finish the progression.

You would know it if a song didn't end on the resolve note; it would feel incomplete and unsettling. You may think you're not a musician, or know nothing of music, but your mind and your ears are so finely tuned to the patterns of music that you would know something was wrong.

And that's the beauty of tension, the resolve. When the bass plays the seventh (dissonant) note briefly on the way back to the root, you (subconsciously) feel that tension build and release.

Without that tension, that unsettled moment, the final resolution would not be as sweet. Should the tension be derided, or scorned, or hated, or thrown out? Hardly. Tension is to be loved when it is like a passing note to a beautiful, beautiful chord. Are we still talking about music?

*at least Western music, which was largely codified and popularized by J.S. Bach in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, specifically with his group of works called The Well-Tempered Clavier. I'm not at all familiar with music traditions originating beyond the European, North, & South American traditions, and I suppose they could be based on some different ideas, specifically regarding consonance and dissonance. Probably likely that they do.